Over half of the money hoarded in Canada’s private foundations should have been paid as taxes. Instead, it’s being funneled to wealthy institutions and organizations complicit in Israel’s military occupation
Private foundations are curious entities.
They are charitable organizations and must be registered in Canada in order to issue tax receipts for donations. But, unlike the tens of thousands of other registered Canadian charities, most private foundations do almost nothing that Canadians would recognize as “charitable.”
They are almost always set up and controlled by wealthy families, and do not raise funds from the public. A family typically makes donations to its own foundation and, once made, the donation becomes part of that foundation’s stockpile of funds, sometimes adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Only a small fraction of these ever-growing stockpiles ever leaves the foundation and ends up in actual charitable activity. And much of the money that does trickle out ends up going to charitable institutions (universities, hospitals, concert halls) that offer desirable naming rights in return.
Of course, the wealthy have the right to create large stockpiles of their own money, and to give it away or not give it away as they choose. But that’s not what is going on here.
Rather the money in these stockpiles is money for which the wealthy donors have received major tax concessions, depriving the country of revenue. This means that much of the money in these foundations is really taken from the public purse; it is public money. In making a donation to its foundation, a wealthy family is putting in some of its own money, along with some public money (often, mostly public money). The family then gets to effectively control all the funds in its foundation, distributing them to the charitable causes of its choice, when and if it chooses. This is an extraordinary amount of power over what amounts to a great deal of public money. (more...)
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